Weddings, weekdays, work and leisure in urban England 1791-1911: the decline of Saint Monday revisited

Past & Present, Nov, 1996 by Douglas A. Reid

One might expect that the poorer a bridal couple was then the less time they and their friends might take off work because of the impact that any absence would have on their earnings. However, it is always desirable for historians to analyse economic behaviour in the light of the cultural context in which it is situated, and the rational assumptions of economic theory do not easily cope with the power of custom, as exemplified by Saint Monday. It is true that John Gillis's pioneering study of modern British marriage conveys the impression that the predominant trend in nineteenth-century weddings was indeed to take as little time off as possible, and certainly to return to work in the afternoon.(24) However, closer inspection of Gillis's own evidence reveals that while this pattern was arguably true of the rural proletariat and of many of "the urban poor", it was less true of northern factory towns, of mining communities, and of Welsh smallholders, who continued earlier traditions of a "big wedding".(25) Thus, in Manchester, Canon Elvy recollected the "great commotion" caused by what he regarded as the "pernicious custom" of "chasing for the marriage glass". He explained that this "almost forced the bridegroom to give a carouse to the neighbourhood" -- a locality of fustian cutters, umbrella coverers, hard-done-by slipper and shirt makers, and lodging-house dwellers ("not a bad lot, taking everything into consideration", opined the canon).(26) At the beginning of the twentieth century Lady Bell's investigations among the ironworkers of Middlesbrough discerned a spectrum of bridal couples ranging from those who "have a day off and enjoy themselves" to those where "the man goes straight back to his work and the wife to her new home", and this idea of a spectrum seems to offer a more plausible account than the first impression conveyed by Gillis.(27) However, even if some early twentieth-century workers took off only the time needed for the wedding, the fact that they chose to get married during the working week, and not on a nonworking Sunday, still indicates which working days were popularly regarded as customary or legitimate days for taking time off, and which might therefore be utilized on other occasions in the year. Clearly, most individuals would not themselves attend weddings very often in the course of a year, but I would argue that the incidence of Monday weddings was a reflection of a general preference for taking Monday as a day of leisure and festivity. In the earlier decades of our period this was still recognized and allowed by some employers; thus in 1810, when Samuel Bamford, then an obscure warehouse clerk at Middleton, near Manchester, was married on a Sunday, his employer gave him the bulk of the following day off to celebrate.(28)

A London music-hall song, Half-Past Nine, or My Wedding Day, may also be adduced to demonstrate both the popularity of Monday weddings in the later nineteenth century and the expectation that the celebrations would last the whole day: